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Denis Mack Smith DENIS MACK SMITH Denis Mack Smith 3 March 1920 – 11 July 2017 elected Fellow of the British Academy 1976 by JOHN A. DAVIS Denis Mack Smith (1920–2017) was the best-known non-Italian historian of modern Italy of his generation. A fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, since 1948, his first book, Cavour and Garibaldi: a Study in Political Conflict(1954), traced the origins of fascism to the short comings of Italian Unification and launched Mack Smith’s career.Italy: a Modern History (1959) quickly became the standard English-language text on mod- ern Italy, leading to his becoming a best-selling author and a major cultural figure. In 1961 he was elected to a Senior Research Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, the position he held until he retired, and in 1976 was elected to a Fellowship of the British Academy. In the same year his study of Mussolini’s foreign policy was published, fol- lowed in 1981 by a biography of the fascist leader. Author of a History of Sicily (with M. I. Finley and C. J. Duggan), an anthology of texts (The Making of Italy 1796– 1870) and numerous essays and articles, Mack Smith also wrote highly acclaimed biographies of Cavour and Giuseppe Mazzini and a history of the Italian monarchy. Modern Italy: a Political History (Yale 1997) rounded off his publishing career by bringing his earlier history up to date. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy, XIX, 17–35 Posted 28 April 2020. © British Academy 2020. DENIS MACK SMITH Denis Mack Smith was the best-known non-Italian historian of modern Italy of his generation. Born in Hampstead in 1920, he attended St Paul’s Cathedral Choir School and Haileybury College, and in 1939 was awarded an organ scholarship at Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he read history. After war service attached to the Cabinet Office he returned to Cambridge to complete his degree and in 1947 he became a college tutor and fellow at Peterhouse. In 1962 he was elected to a Senior Research Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, the position he held until his retirement in 1987. An Emeritus Fellow of the college and an Honorary Fellow of both Wolfson College, Oxford, and Peterhouse, after retirement Mack Smith remained in Oxford and contin- ued to publish on Italian history. His scholarship brought him many accolades; as well as Fellowships of the British Academy and the Royal Society for Literature, he was awarded a CBE. In Italy he was especially proud to have been appointed Public Orator of the Republic of San Marino and an Honorary Citizen of the town of Santa Margherita Ligure. In 1984 he received the Italian Presidential Medal and then in 1996 one of Italy’s highest honours when he was nominated a Grand Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic. The first in his family to attend university, Mack Smith’s early interest in Italy was an offshoot of his love of music and at Cambridge modern Italy became his principal field of enquiry. With barely 200 students Peterhouse was one of the smallest in the university, but following Mack Smith’s election it boasted seven history fellows, more than any other Cambridge college. Four were professors: Michael Postan, Denis Brogan, David Knowles and Mack Smith’s former tutor, Herbert Butterfield, who was elected Master of the college in 1955. This heterogeneous fellowship was renowned for its strongly held although widely different and not always very consistent views on what the study of history was or should be about. While Butterfield was renowned for his biting pre-war critique of what he termed the ‘Whig interpretation of history’, by the time Mack Smith joined the college he had come round to accepting most of the premises that he had once derided and was on good terms with his distinguished colleague, George Macaulay Trevelyan, by any measure the very model of the Whig historians that Butterfield had formerly attacked.1 The connection with Trevelyan would have an important albeit indirect part to play in shaping Mack Smith’s early career. Regius Professor of History in Cambridge in the inter-war years and then Master of Trinity College, Trevelyan was best known for his work on English history, but he was also the leading English historian of Italy’s struggles for political independence and unity in the mid-nineteenth century. He had 1 See D. Cannadine, G. M. Trevelyan: a Life in History (London, 1992); C. T. McIntire, Herbert Butterfield, Historian as Dissenter (New Haven, CT, 2004); M. Bentley, The Life and Times of Herbert Butterfield (Cambridge, 2016). 20 John A. Davis been drawn to Italy in the decade before the First World War by his belief that Italy’s achievement of unification after centuries of foreign occupation and division was the most impressive demonstration of the creative and progressive force of liberalism in the nineteenth century. Italians, he believed, had been alone in Europe in understand- ing the emancipatory force of British liberalism and, written almost half a century after Italy’s unification, Trevelyan’s widely read studies celebrated Italy’s achievement of independence and unification as the only truly heroic moment of Europe’s long nineteenth century. At the centre of Trevelyan’s epic account was Giuseppe Garibaldi, the heroic leader who won international fame first as the defender of the Roman Republic in 1849 and then as leader of the fabled expedition of the Thousand volun- teers to Sicily in May 1860. By precipitating the fall of the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, Garibaldi’s Expedition made possible the political unification of the ‘two Italies’, the North and the South. But if Garibaldi was the unalloyed hero of Trevelyan’s account, his studies underlined how the different personalities and skills of the Piedmontese politician and prime minister Count Camillo Benso di Cavour, and the Genoese republican and democrat Giuseppe Mazzini, had formed an unlikely but complementary partnership that made possible Italian unification and the establishment of the first constitutional monarchy in southern Europe. The crisis that overwhelmed Italian democracy after the Great War and the rise of Mussolini’s fascism called Trevelyan’s glowing account of the liberal origins of the unified Italian nation into question, and the task of rewriting that narrative would now pass to Peterhouse’s youngest history fellow. Unlike many other young non-Ital- ian scholars who were led by their wartime experiences to study Italian fascism and its origins, Mack Smith’s first encounters with Italy came not during but immediately after the war, in 1946 when a small college travel bursary enabled him to embark on the first of many research expeditions. His quest for documents took him from Turin to Florence, then to Rome, Naples and Palermo, and confronted him with a country in political turmoil. Prostrated by the devastating legacies of Mussolini’s wars, and not least a civil war that after 1943 had set fascists, anti-fascists and Nazi occupiers against one another, the country’s political future remained uncertain, although its shape was beginning to emerge. In June 1946 an institutional referendum resulted in the abolition of a monarchy that had been irreparably damaged by complicity with Mussolini’s regime, following which, in September, a Constituent Assembly was elected. The constitution of the new Republic was approved in January 1948. At the time of Mack Smith’s first visit the situation was particularly grim, especially in the south. Naples could claim the sad primacy of being Italy’s most heavily bombed city during the war, and it had suffered further violence and destructive reprisals following a popular rising against the German occupying forces before the Allied forces reached the city in September 1943. Even after the liberation conditions DENIS MACK SMITH 21 remained desperate, and the Allies did little to remedy the plight of those the war had left without housing or work, adequate food, clothing, heating materials or medical supplies and prey to disease and starvation. Mack Smith’s first encounters with the devastated city left him with a deep sympathy for the sufferings that Mussolini’s wars had imposed on Italian civilians. His most important intellectual encounter, however, was with the Neapolitan senator Benedetto Croce, post-war Italy’s most eminent philosopher, historian, liberal politi- cian, elder statesman and famed anti-fascist. A senator since 1910, Croce twice served as a minister and had played a prominent political role after the fall of Mussolini. His name was frequently mooted as a likely president of the new Republic and his politi- cal prominence gave him access to the highest representatives of the post-war Allied administration. His concern to re-establish intellectual contacts with Italy’s former enemies ensured the young Cambridge historian access to the senator’s entourage and to his rich and ancient private library that was being transformed into an inter national centre for historical research. Mack Smith later acknowledged that at the time his limited spoken Italian had restricted possibilities of conversation, but his own inter- pretation of the origins of fascism would take the form of an extended refutation of Croce’s writings and ideas. It was not all work, however, and his time in war-scarred Naples yielded a rich repertoire of anecdotes, including a chance encounter in Positano with Norman Douglas, the famed author of Old Calabria, whose proposition that they make a road trip together through southern Italy he politely declined.2 In Palermo the situation was if anything even worse. The Sicilian cities had also suffered terribly from bombing raids before and after the Allied landings in July 1943 and as on the southern mainland after the fall of fascism older social conflicts had quickly re-emerged.
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